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host · 10-19-2006, 11:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by stevo

Maybe I should hyphenate it? if I asked about militant jihadism would I get the same response?

Consider that current US ambassador to Iraq, and former US ambassador to Afghanistan, (aka "Viceroy") Zalmay Khalilzad was an assistant professor at Columbia U., influenced by Carter Nat.Security Advisor, Z. Brzezinski. Consider that <b>"jihad"</b> was a psy-ops "tool" of US, "force multplication policy, intent on destabalizing the Soviet military in Afghanistan, by exploiting the latent religious "fervor" of the native islamic Afghan people....and that a larger goal was to, as Richard Pipes is quote saying, below, to incite "hatred that can quickly explode into genocidal fury", by US "ops" aimed at muslims in Soviet provinces.

I document the reporting of Richard Pipes as a "neocon", in 1981, <b>and the "Team B", "op" that was a predecessor of the more recent neocon effort to challenge and manipulate CIA intelligence about Iraqi WMD....in order to exaggerate the threat of the Soviet Union in the late 70's and early 80'a....</b>

Consider that much of the influence on your opinions about islam and about the islamic "threat", comes from the hyperactive islamophobe, Daniel Pipes, son of Richard Pipes, and, a Bush "recess appointee" who is as much of a belligerant and as lacking as a diplomat, as John Bolton.

It amazes me that so many folks who embrace the politics to the right of the center, also embrace the "thinking" of these militarist neocon nutcases....what have they been "right" about, compared to what their meddling has cost the US, during the past 30 years. Brzesinksi's decisions in countering the Soviets, via Afghanistan, place him squarely....in the late 70's, in the neocon "camp".

<b>Consider that, as Daniel Pipes is the son of Richard, your "targeting" of militant islam is the "son" of your own neocon forebearer's short sighted, and failed strategy....you're now "very concerned" by the "blow back" of the CIA brainwashing of young central Asian and middle eastern muslims, over at least the past 30 nearly years..... the implication is that your "belief system", and you're GWOT "leaders", are all "rubbing one off", in a "circle jerk" that is the "fruit" of the failed "psy-ops" that you now clamor for even more of, because your own neocon polluted government stays "on message" (the "caliphate" ...from spain to indonesia....bullshit...) to perpetually tweak your fears....</b>

Quote:

http://www.tenc.net/analysis/zbi-zal.htm
.....The second problem with the Khalilzad/Unocal argument, related to the first, is that it violates a prime rule learned by every first year statistics student. That rule is, "Correlation Does Not Prove Cause."

Right off the bat, no less than three hypotheses could easily (indeed better!) explain the *correlation* between Khalilzad's gig at Unocal and his present high-power position in Afghanistan.

* Hypothesis 1: Khalilzad Was Used As A Door Opener *

Khalilzad has been a key player in the Imperial policy of using Afghanistan to hurt Russia, a policy that began in 1979 and has never stopped. Therefore he is very powerful, and Unocal hired him, as companies often hire powerful people, as a figurehead, because his name opens doors in Washington and Afghanistan, and he had no objection to taking their money. And precisely because he has been a key foreign policy strategist (since 1985), now that NATO is once again using Afghanistan to attack Russia, it is natural that he take direct charge in Afghanistan.

And/or:

* Hypothesis 2: Unocal Was Used by Khalilzad as a Cover for Covert Work *

Since 1979, US and Saudi secret services and their offspring, the Pakistani ISI (secret service), have managed the attack on Afghanistan, in which Khalilzad was a *very* high-level operator. He accepted the job at Unocal as a cover for some covert assignment involving relations with the Taliban, the Northern Alliance, or whomever

And/or:

* Hypothesis 3: Unocal Acted as an Agent of Western Policy in Afghanistan *

Pipelines mainly benefit the governments of the countries they pass through in the same way that taxi rides benefit the taxicab owners: because sovereign governments are paid a fee based on the volume of oil that passes through their territories. The Imperial plan was for the Taliban to consolidate control of Afghanistan by defeating or uniting with the Northern Alliance. Therefore Unocal, which enjoys friendly relations with the CIA, dangled the carrot of a pipeline before the Taliban, stressing:

"the benefits such a pipeline could bring to this desperately poor and war-torn country"

with the proviso that:

"the project could not and would not proceed until there was an internationally recognized government in place in Afghanistan that fairly represented all its people." http://web.archive.org/web/200111211...ews/091401.htm

Under cover of being a consultant, Zalmay Khalilzad's role was to assist the Unocal people in properly dangling the pipeline carrot.

Hypotheses One, Two and Three are not contradictory. All three could be true. Moreover they are not pure speculation because they are based on the study of actual data. Some of this data is cited in articles you can link to in *Further Reading*, at the end.

I dug up some fresh data during 30 hours spent on the Internet reading newspaper and other reports published over the past 17 years about Zalmay Khalilzad. It's clear that he's important, so I will try to assemble a chronological account of Khalilzad's career. Anyway, as an appetizer, here are two pieces of information from the mid-1980s.

* Zalmay Khalilzad in 1986 *

According to a Feb. 5, 1986 article in the Washington Post, on Feb. 1, 1986 Khalilzad participated, as an "outside [i.e., outside of government] expert" on Afghanistan, in a VIP seminar on Afghanistan, sponsored by US Secretary of State George P. Schultz. Other participants included:

* Caspar W. Weinberger, Secretary of Defense;

* William J. Casey, Director of CIA;

* Zbigniew Brzezinski, formerly the Security Adviser to President Carter and, according to his own 'boast', a key planner of the terrorist war against Afghanistan in the 1980s;

* Donald Rumsfeld and James Schlesinger, both at that time former secretaries of defense;

* And William Hyland, editor of Foreign Affairs, the magazine of the powerful Council on Foreign Relations, and previously perhaps the top CIA expert on Russia.

Prof. Zalmay Khalilzad was then about 35 years old. The men named above were in their 50s, 60s or older.

* Zalmay Khalilzad In 1985 *

The year before Secretary of State Shultz's seminar, Zalmay Khalilzad's name came up in an AP dispatch which I've posted in full below.

Here are a few things I noticed about the dispatch:

* Though Khalilzad was then about 34 years old, the AP refers to him as a "luminary".

* Khalilzad was on the Board of a company called Friends of Afghanistan. Also on the Board was Zbigniew Brzezinski, a key advocate of using Afghanistan to attack Russia. (2)

* According to the AP dispatch, in 1985 Congress passed a law creating a fund to influence public opinion to support the terrorist Mujahideen. Congress virtually ordered that Friends of Afghanistan be hired for this work. It authorized $500 000 to start (about $1 Million today) with another $500 000 expected.

This AP dispatch is evidence that a) though very young, Khalilzad was an associate if not a protege of Brzezinski and b) Khalilzad was already trusted by the powers-that-be to oversee the crucial work of organizing public support for the unsupportable US policy of fostering Islamic terrorism to destroy the Soviet Union. The "marching order" (AP's phrase) to hire Friends of Afghanistan certainly sounds like Friends was a top-level CIA front disguised as a private company, the better to deal with the press.

* The media has now rewritten history, propagating the view that US officials were simply unaware of the Islamic fanaticism of the pro-US side in Afghanistan. <b>Zalmay Khalilzad has voiced this "we didn't know" line himself.</b> (I have unfortunately misplaced the quote in which he claims "I never knew how bad they were" but hopefully I'll find it again.)

As the AP dispatch below demonstrates, during the 1980s war the Western media misdescribed Islamic fundamentalists as "rebels." Thus the AP says:

"Afghan rebels, called the Mujahadeen [sic!], have been battling 100,000 Soviet troops..."

<b>as if Mujahideen were a local name for these "rebels" rather than an Arabic word. 'Mu' means 'one who.' 'Jahid' equals 'Jihad' means 'struggle' or 'strive for' but in practice - and abundantly in the Muslim holy writings, alhadith, the narrations about the life of Muhammad - it means leaving home to fight for Islam. So a Mujahid is one fights for Islam. "Een" makes it plural. So Mujahideen are Islamic holy warriors. Muslim holy texts devote much attention to the special place in heaven reserved for slain Mujahideen.</b> (See for example http://www.2600.com/news/mirrors/har...ihad/grade.htm )
It is inconceivable that any reporter covering the Afghan travesty <b>was unaware that the US was promoting Islamic holy warriors. Prof. Khalilzad, who is from Afghanistan, of course knew exactly what sort of forces were being created by the CIA et al in his country.</b> The job of Friends of Afghanistan was precisely to play down the Islamic holy warrior reality, and play up the phony 'victimized rebels fighting Soviet tyranny' baloney.

In any case, unless Khalilzad's career did a nosedive after 1985-6, surely he is *not* a person one would define by his very brief stint as "an advisor to Unocal."

We'll look at Khalilzad more in a later article, but for now, here is the AP dispatch.

[Note added 1 March 2003: That article can now be read.] http://emperors-clothes.com/archive/khalilzad-facts.htm

-- Jared Israel.

Headline: U.S. Provides $500 000 So Afghan Rebels Can Tell Their Story

AP, September 16, 1985, Monday, PM cycle SECTION: Washington Dateline

By JOAN MOWER

WASHINGTON

Guerrillas in Afghanistan are about to get money from the United States government for a public relations campaign intended to bring their struggle against Soviet troops to the world's attention.

The money will train Afghan rebel journalists to use television, radio and newspapers to advance their cause. Reporters will be given mini-cameras to photograph the war inside Afghanistan.

"It is the goal of this project to facilitate the collection, development and distribution of credible, objective and timely professional-quality news stories, photographs and television images about developments in Afghanistan," said a notice in the Federal Register. The program will be overseen by Uncle Sam's own propaganda arm, the U.S. Information Agency. Congress appropriated $500 000 to hire experts and may provide more later.

In making the money available, Congress all but instructed USIA to consider an organization like Friends of Afghanistan, a new group whose board includes former Carter administration national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, known for hard-line anti-Soviet views.....

Quote:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html
According to this 1998 interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, the CIA's intervention in Afghanistan preceded the 1979 Soviet invasion. This decision of the Carter Administration in 1979 to intervene and destabilise Afghanistan is the root cause of Afghanistan's destruction as a nation.

M.C.
The CIA's Intervention in Afghanistan
Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski,
President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser

Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998
Posted at globalresearch.ca 15 October 2001

Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. <h3>But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul.</h3> And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

B: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?

B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, <b>I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.</b> Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

<b>Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?</b>

Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

B: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn't a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.

Quote:

http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/a...-dec/clem.html
Air University Review, November-December 1986
The Soviet Union:
Crisis, Stability, or Renewal?

Dr. Ralph S. Clem

<b>the Ethnic Factor</b>

......The maintenance of this "Soviet empire" is then said to be dependent on clever manipulation of the political system and the pervasiveness of the secret police. Such a situation, according to Richard Pipes, means that ". . . ethnic conflicts in the USSR assume the form of a battle of wits . . . [wherein the non-Russians] . . . try to outsmart Moscow."23 Beneath the surface, however, Pipes believes that "there smolders resentment and, in some areas, hatred that can quickly explode into genocidal fury should the heavy hand of Russian authority weaken."24.......

Quote:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/19990215/hiro/2
article | posted January 28, 1999 (February 15, 1999 issue)
The Cost of an Afghan 'Victory'

Dilip Hiro

page 2 of 4 | PREV 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 NEXT

As for Saudi Arabia, the remaining member of the troika, it had long been a bulwark of anti-Communism, its rulers lavish in their funding of antileftist forces around the globe--be it in Angola, Mozambique, Portugal or Italy. The fact that the population of Afghanistan was 99 percent Muslim was an additional incentive to Riyadh.

The US-Saudi-Pakistani alliance's financing, training and arming of the mujahedeen--recruited from among the 3 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan--was coordinated and supervised by the CIA. The day-to-day management rested with Pakistan's ISI. All donations in weapons and cash to the campaign by various sources--chiefly Washington and Riyadh--were handled by the CIA. These amounted to about $40 billion, with the bulk coming from the United States and Saudi Arabia, which contributed equally.

The volunteers underwent military training and political education. Both were imparted by the ISI. <h3>In the political classes the mujahedeen were given a strong dose of nationalism and Islam.</h3> The fact that the Soviets were foreign and atheistic made them doubly despicable. The intention was to fire up militant Muslims to fight Soviet imperialism. Armed with CIA-supplied Stinger missiles in the later stages of the jihad, the mujahedeen made a hash of Soviet helicopter gunships, a critical tool of the USSR's counterinsurgency campaign.

Quote:

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/analy.../0402teamb.php
A History of Threat Escalation
Remembering Team B
By Tom Barry | February 12, 2004

The most notorious attempt by militarists and right-wing ideologues <b>to challenge the CIA was the Team B affair in the mid-1970s.</b> The 1975-76 “Team B” operation was a classic case of threat escalation by hawks determined to increase military budgets and step up the U.S. offensive in the cold war. Concocted by right-wing ideologues and militarists, Team B aimed to bury the politics of détente and the SALT arms negotiations, which were supported by the leadership of both political parties. 1

The historical record shows that the call for an independent assessment of the CIA's conclusions came from the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB--pronounced piffy-ab ). But <b>the fear-mongering and challenges to the CIA's threat assessments--known as National Intelligence Estimates--actually started with nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter, who laid down the gauntlet in a 1974 Foreign Policy article entitled “Is There a Strategic Arms Race?” 2 Wohlstetter answered his rhetorical question negatively, concluding that the United States was allowing the Soviet Union to achieve military superiority by not closing the “missile gap.”</b> Having inspired the Gaither Commission in 1957 to raise the missile gap alarm, Wohlstetter applied the same threat assessment methodology to energize hawks, cold warriors, and right-wing anticommunists in the mid-1970s to kill the politics of détente and increase budget allocations for the Pentagon. Following his Foreign Policy essay, Wohlstetter, who had left his full-time position at RAND to become a professor at the University of Chicago, organized an informal study group that included younger neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz and longtime hawks like Paul Nitze.

PFIAB, which was dominated by right-wingers and hawks, followed Wohlstetter's lead and joined the threat assessment battle by calling in 1975 for an independent committee to evaluate the CIA's intelligence estimates. Testimony by PFIAB President Leo Cherne to the House Intelligence Committee in December 1975 alerted committee members to the need for better intelligence about the Soviet Union. “Intelligence cannot help a nation find its soul,” said Cherne. “It is indispensable, however, to help preserve the nation's safety, while it continues its search,” he added. George Bush Sr., who was about to leave his ambassadorship in China to become director of intelligence at the CIA, congratulated Cherne on his testimony, indicating that he would not oppose an independent evaluation of CIA intelligence estimates.

Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush Support Team B

Joining in the chorus of praise, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Bechtel's president George Shultz also congratulated Cherne, implicitly adding their backing for an independent threat assessment committee. 3 Led by several of the board's more hawkish members--including John Foster, Edward Teller, William Casey, Seymour Weiss, W. Glenn Campbell, and Clare Booth Luce--PFIAB had earlier in 1975 called for an independent evaluation of the CIA's national intelligence estimates. Feeling that the country's nuclear weapons industry and capacity was threatened, PFIAB was aiming to derail the arms control treaties then under negotiation.

Shortly after President Gerald Ford appointed Bush to be the new director of intelligence, replacing the beleaguered William Colby, Bush authorized PFIAB's plan for an alternative review. The review consisted of three panels: one to assess the threat posed by Soviet missile accuracy; another to determine the effect of Soviet air defenses on U.S. strategic bombers; and a third--the Strategic Objectives Panel--to determine the Soviet Union's intentions. The work of this last panel, which became known as the Team B Report, was the most controversial. As Paul Warnke, an official at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency at the time of the Team B exercise, wrote: “Whatever might be said for evaluation of strategic capabilities by a group of outside experts, the impracticality of achieving useful results by ‘independent' analysis of strategic objectives should have been self-evident. Moreover, the futility of the Team B enterprise was assured by the selection of the panel's members. Rather than including a diversity of views ... the Strategic Objectives Panel was composed entirely of individuals who made careers of viewing the Soviet menace with alarm.” 4

<b>Team members included Richard Pipes (father of Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum) and William Van Cleave, both of whom would become members of the second Committee on the Present Danger, as well as Gen. Daniel Graham, whose "High Frontier" missile defense proposal foreshadowed President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or "Star Wars."</b> The team's advisory panel included Paul Wolfowitz, Paul Nitze, and Seymour Weiss--all close associates of Albert Wohlstetter. 5 Although Richard Perle played no direct role in Team B, he was instrumental in setting it up. It was Perle who had introduced Richard Pipes, a Polish immigrant who taught Czarist Russian history at Harvard, to Sen. Henry Jackson, catapulting Pipes into a clique of fanatically anti-Soviet hawks. Pipes, who served as Team B's chairman, later said he chose Wolfowitz as his principal Team B adviser "because Richard Perle recommended him so highly." 6

Committee on the Present Danger Follows Team B

The Team B Report, released as an “October surprise” in an attempt to derail Jimmy Carter's 1976 presidential bid, argued that “Soviet leaders are first and foremost offensively rather than defensively minded.” The team had arrived at this conclusion of Soviet intent from an assessment of the USSR 's capabilities, but they ignored evidence pointing to an opposite conclusion.....

......But as Anne Hessing Cahn establishes in her history of the Team B affair, some of the CIA estimates critiqued by Team B were themselves exaggerations, particularly the estimates of Soviet military spending. “With the advantage of hindsight,” she explains, “we now know that Soviet military spending increases began to slow down precisely as Team B was writing about an ‘intense military buildup in nuclear as well as conventional forces of all sorts, not moderated either by the West's self-imposed restraints or by the [Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT)]'.” “But even at the time of the affair,” continues Cahn, “Team B had at its disposal sufficient information to know that the Soviet Union was in severe decline. As Soviet defectors were telling us in anguished terms that the system was collapsing, Team B looked at the quantity but not the quality of missiles, tanks, and planes, at the quantity of Soviet men under arms, but not their morale, leadership, alcoholism, or training.” 8

The Team B report paved the way for the second Committee on the Present Danger, which formed weeks after Team B had released its findings. The committee's first major policy statement, titled What Is the Soviet Union Up To? was written by Team B leader Richard Pipes, who along with other participants in the Team B exercise--including Foy Kohler, Paul Nitze, and William Van Cleave--were founding members of the Committee on the Present Danger.

Team B as Model for Post-Cold War Intelligence

Right-wing ideologues and militarists frequently cite the example of Team B as a successful model for challenging moderate threat assessments by the foreign policy establishment, particularly the CIA and the State Department. In prevailing over the CIA, Team B demonstrated that “strategic intelligence” based on a policy-driven analysis of an adversary's perceived intentions could triumph over fact-based intelligence. Through adroit organizing by hawks inside and outside of government, the Team B effort helped re-launch the cold war.

The end of the cold war did not bring to a close the long-running dispute between the national security alarmists on the right and the more conservative analysis of security threats by the CIA, the State Department, and the military itself. <b>In the case of Iraq , the ideologues and militarists, following the Team B model, insisted on the primacy of strategic intelligence. Once again the U.S. government allowed a militarist policy by ideology and fear-mongering to trump facts and reason..</b>

Quote:

HAWK' OR REALIST?; REAGAN ADVISER PIPES INSISTS HE'S THE LATTER; [FIRST Edition]
Nina McCain Globe Staff. Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext). Boston, Mass.: Jan 25, 1981. pg. 1

Richard Pipes arrived in America on his l7th birthday, July ll, l940. He and his father and mother had fled from the Nazi invasion of Poland.

One of his most vivid memories of his new country was seeing an advertisement with a quotation from Benjamin Franklin.

"It said something like, Unforeseen events need not change the course of men's lives.' I laughed. I had witnessed the outbreak of war in Poland, seen my house destroyed, been forced to leave home and migrate thousands of miles."

The chasm between American optimism and the Eastern European experience of the ravages of war has shaped Richard Pipes' view of the world and, for the next few years, Pipes will have a hand in shaping America's foreign policy. The Harvard professor will be the specialist on the Soviet Union for the Reagan Administration's National Security Council.

<h3>He is one of the leading figures in a group of intellectuals who are lumped together under the label "neoconservative,"</h3> many of whose members write for the combative Commentary magazine. Pipes shares with them a conviction that America has grown soft and sleepy about national defense and a determination to lead a reawakening.

Pipes says he and and like-minded members of the Committee on the Present Danger are "the same kind of people who, in l936 or l937, would have backed Churchill in England. (People who said* Germany is arming, preparing for war, and we are doing nothing."

Substitute the words "Soviet Union" for "Germany" and you have a rough notion of Pipes' approach to US-Soviet relations.

Pipes is the latest in a series of Soviet experts to serve in the highest councils in Washington. Like those who have preceded him, from Charles E. (Chip) Bohlen and George Kennan to Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Marshall Shulman, Pipes brings his own interpretation of US-Soviet relations to the job.

Although he shares a common Eastern European background with Kissinger andBrzezinski, Pipes is sharply critical of what he regards as their "ego trips," and of the doctrine of detente which Kissinger first espoused and more recently downplayed.

The problem with detente - the pursuit of arms limitation, trade agreements and a stabilized US-Soviet relationship - Pipes argues, is that the Russians aren't playing by the same rules. While American strategists talk about nuclear parity and deterrence, the Soviets are aiming for superiority and, ultimately, victory.

Often described as a "hardliner" or "hawk," Pipes prefers to think ofhimself as a realist.

"If you want to prevent nuclear war, or to contain the damage, you have to look at it realistically," Pipes said in an interview last week. "That does not mean I am in favor of nuclear war. You would have to be insane (to favor such a war) . . . I am a very pacific person. I don't even own a gun."

Pipes is particularly critical of the notion, which he says has been sold to Americans by a succession of political leaders of both parties, that nuclear war is "unthinkable" and "unimaginable."

"The idea that the explosion of one nuclear bomb means the end of mankind leads to paralysis," he says. "You have to look at it very coldly . . . If a physician is confronted with a terrible disease, he is not likely to cure it by tearing his hair out. You want a physician who is cool."

A tall, slender man whose dark hair is in retreat from a high forehead, Pipes personifies cool. Juggling an interview and a steady stream of phone calls from well-wishers, he managed to be gracious, pleased and unflustered.

Pipes is an expert on 19th century Russian who has spent 34 of his 57 years at Harvard, first as a graduate student and then as a professor. As he tells it, if the Harvard history department had been more flexible, he might not be on his way to Washington now.

After a couple of years at a small college in Ohio and three years in the Air Force, Pipes came to Harvard interested in the history of art and philosophy, which he wanted to combine somehow with the Russian studies he had begun at Cornell under Air Force auspices.....

.....He first caught the eye of Washington insiders in 1970 when he delivered a paper on US-Soviet relations to the American Historical Association. An aide to Sen. Henry Jackson (D-Wash.) liked the paper and Pipes became a consultant to Jackson's Permanent Committee on Investigations.

But it was not until l976 that he gained national attention when he headed the "B-team," a group of non-governmental experts brought in by President Ford's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board to assess US estimates of Soviet strength. The experts looked at the same data used by the "A team," the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and came to startlingly different conclusions.

The team's highly critical report charged that the CIA had consistently underestimated the nature and extent of the Soviet threat. It warned that the Soviets would soon be militarily superior to the US and could use that superiority to force US withdrawal from crucial areas like the Mideast.

Coming in the midst of the Nixon-Ford era of relatively good relations with the Soviet Union, the report struck at the very foundations of the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT) and created turmoil within the intelligence community.

Out of the "B team"came the Committee on the Present Danger (there was some membership overlap), and a widely-discussed article in Commentary in which Pipes set out his views on Soviet strategy.

In that article, entitled "Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War," he argued that Americans have been deluded into believing that the Soviets accept detente and have renounced nuclear war.

"The strategic doctrine adopted by the USSR over the past two decades," he wrote, "calls for a policy diametrically opposite to that adopted in the United States by the predominant community of civilian strategists: not deterrence but victory, not sufficiency in weapons but superiority, not retaliation but offensive action."

The Soviets, he wrote, used to sustaining enormous casualties in war (20 million in World War II) and with a much more widely dispersed population, do not share the American conviction that nuclear war is suicidal. Soviet leaders, Pipes claimed, regard nuclear war as not only thinkable but winnable.

"In the United States, the consensus of the educated and affluent holds all recourse to force to be the result of an an inability or an unwillingness to apply rational analysis and patient negotiation to disagreements: the use of force is prima facie evidence of failure."

In contrast, he wrote, "The Soviet ruling elite regards conflict and violence as natural regulators of all human affairs."

Pipes says he prefers the American view but thinks it "not always realistic."

He regards himself as a "very standard, traditional liberal" and a Democract who has been forced out of the party because it has shifted so far to the left....

.."In the first place, Harvard is nowhere near as liberal as people think," he says. "And, secondly, I have good friends who say, Your political views are crazy but you're a nice fellow.' "

In fact, a number of Pipes' colleagues and other Russian specialists regard his political views as not only crazy but dangerous.

"If he really believes all that stuff he writes," says one Soviet expert and government consultant who asked not to be named, "and if he's going to be pouring it into the ear of Ronald Reagan, who is not terribly well informed, it is going to make it even more difficult for this powerful nation to behave with restraint."....

Quote:

http://www.harvardmagazine.com/on-line/010540.html
Militant about "Islamism"
Daniel Pipes wages "hand-to-hand combat" with a "totalitarian ideology."

by Janet Tassel

"It's a mistake to blame Islam, a religion 14 centuries old, for the evil that should be ascribed to militant Islam, a totalitarian ideology less than a century old. Militant Islam is the problem, but moderate Islam is the solution."

~Daniel Pipes

Richard Pipes, Baird research professor of history, recounts in his recent book, Vixi, that when Daniel, his first child, was born in 1949, he felt as if he himself were being reborn. To mark the event he even quit smoking.

And, in a sense, with the birth of Daniel, Richard Pipes was indeed reborn, perhaps even cloned. Daniel '71, Ph.D. '78 (early Islamic history), is what old-timers would call a chip off the old block. Both are essentially loners, non-belongers (the subtitle of Vixi is Memoirs of a Non-Belonger), and fighters. Pipes the elder, the fiercely anti-communist cold-warrior, head of President Ford's Team B (formed to evaluate the CIA's estimates of Soviet nuclear intentions) and Soviet policy adviser to President Reagan, was cursed as a "wretched anti-Sovietist" by Pravda—and pretty well marginalized at Harvard for his politics.

In some ways Daniel, a specialist on Islam as an influence in history, is even more an outsider than his father. Founder and director of his own think tank, Middle East Forum (MEF), his current role in academe is gadfly. Though he taught world history from 1978 to 1982 at the University of Chicago, history at Harvard from 1983 to 1984, and policy strategy at the Naval War College from 1984 to 1986, he has parted ways with the academy—to the satisfaction of both, it seems. "I have the simple politics of a truck driver," he told an interviewer, "not the complex ones of an academic. My viewpoint is not congenial with institutions of higher learning." More congenial was his stint on the policy-planning staff at the State Department in 1983 and his seven years as director of a Philadelphia think tank called the Foreign Policy Research Institute, before starting Middle East Forum in 1994.

At Middle East Forum, he is publisher of Middle East Quarterly, which he says, "seeks out voices excluded from the scholarly debate, voices more aligned with the pro-American views of mainstream Americans." And he has initiated Campus Watch, a website and speakers' bureau that monitors Middle Eastern studies at North American universities—"a kind of Consumer Reports," he says, "for students, parents, alumni, and legislators" to air perceived biases and inaccuracies. This is yet another irritant to critics like Rashid Khalidi, Said professor of Arab studies and director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University, who calls the Campus Watchers "intellectual thugs"; Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan, deems the project "cyberstalking." "Crude McCarthyism" and "totalitarianism" are among the less vitriolic terms used by other scholars to describe Campus Watch. In addition, Pipes is now in his final year as a director of the federally funded U.S. Institute of Peace....

....The Washington Post editorialized that the nomination was a "cruel joke," pointing out that the institute was supposed to be working on a special initiative to create a bridge between cultures, but "Mr. Pipes has long been regarded by Muslims as a destroyer of such bridges." The Arab American Institute, an activist policy organization headed by James Zogby, released a statement saying, in part, <h3>"For decades Daniel Pipes has displayed a bizarre obsession with all things Arab and Muslim.

Now, it appears that his years of hatred and bigotry have paid off with a presidential appointment. One shudders to think how he will abuse this position to tear at the fabric of our nation."</h3>....

Quote:

http://www.danielpipes.org/article/1040
Why the Left Loves Osama [and Saddam]

by Daniel Pipes
New York Post
March 19, 2003

* German version of this item

Has anyone noticed an indifference in the precincts of the far Left to the fatalities of 9/11 and the horrors of Saddam Hussein?

Right after the 9/11 attack, German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen called it "the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos." Eric Foner, an ornament of Columbia University's Marxist firmament, trivialized it by announcing himself unsure "which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House." Norman Mailer called the suicide hijackers "brilliant."

More recently, it appears that none of the millions of antiwar demonstrators have a bad word to say about Saddam Hussein nor an iota of sympathy for those oppressed, tortured and murdered by his regime. Instead, they vent fury against the American president and British prime minister.

Why is the Left nonchalant about the outrages committed by al Qaeda and Baghdad?

Lee Harris, an Atlanta writer, offers an explanation in a recent issue of the Hoover Institution's journal, Policy Review. He does so by stepping way back and recalling Karl Marx's central thesis about the demise of capitalism resulting from an inevitable sequence of events:

* Business profits decline in the industrial countries
* Bosses squeeze their workers;
* Workers become impoverished;
* Workers rebel against their bosses, and
* Workers establish a socialist order.

Everything here hangs on workers growing poorer over time - which, of course, did not happen. In fact, Western workers became richer (and increasingly un-revolutionary). By the roaring 1950s, most of the Left realized that Marx got it wrong.

But rather than give up on cherished expectations of socialist revolution, Harris notes, Marxists tweaked their theory. Abandoning the workers of advanced industrial countries, they looked instead to the entire populations of poor countries to carry out the revolution. Class analysis went out the window, replaced by geography.

This new approach, known as "dependencia theory," holds that the First World (and the United States above all) profits by forcefully exploiting the Third Word. The Left theorizes that the United States oppresses poor countries; thus Noam Chomsky's formulation that America is a "leading terrorist state."

For vindication of this claim, Marxists impatiently await the Third World's rising up against the West. Sadly for them, the only true revolution since the 1950s was Iran's in 1978-79. It ended with militant Islam in power and the Left in hiding.

Then came 9/11, which Marxists interpreted as the Third World (finally!) striking back at its American oppressor. In the Left's imagination, Harris explains, this attack was nothing less than "world-historical in its significance: the dawn of a new revolutionary era."

Only a pedant would point out that the suicide hijackers hardly represented the wretched of the earth; and that their objectives had nothing at all to do with socialism and everything to do with - no, not again! - militant Islam.

So desperate is the Left for some sign of true socialism, it overlooks such pesky details. Instead, it warily admires al Qaeda, the Taliban and militant Islam in general for doing battle with the United States. The Left tries to overlook militant Islam's slightly un-socialist practices - such as its imposing religious law, excluding women from the workplace, banning the payment of interest, encouraging private property and persecuting atheists.

This admiring spirit explains the Left's nonchalant response to 9/11. Sure, it rued the loss of life, but not too much. Dario Fo, the Italian Marxist who won the 1997 Nobel Prize for literature, explains: "The great [Wall Street] speculators wallow in an economy that every year kills tens of millions of people with poverty, so what is 20,000 dead in New York?"

The same goes for Saddam Hussein, whose gruesome qualities matter less to the Left than the fact of his confronting and defying the United States. In its view, anyone who does that can't be too bad - never mind that he brutalizes his subjects and invades his neighbors. The Left takes to the streets to assure his survival, indifferent both to the fate of Iraqis and even to their own safety, clutching instead at the hope that this monster will somehow bring socialism closer.

In sum: 9/11 and the prospect of war against Saddam Hussein have exposed the Left's political self-delusion, intellectual bankruptcy and moral turpitude.

Quote:

http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/273
Daniel Pipes' Weblog
The Leftist-Islamist Alliance in Pictures

June 17, 2004

Take a look at the picture at left of Joelle Aubron, a French woman just released from prison for health reasons (a brain tumour) after serving seventeen years for her murderous activities in Action Directe, the extremist left-wing group.

Note anything odd about her headgear? It's a Palestinian-style keffiye. It may not be exactly what you'd expect a French woman to wear (in the Middle East, by the way, it's a purely male article of clothing), but her wearing it serves as a perfect symbol of the blossoming red-green alliance. Leftists and Islamists are both totalitarians and both hate Western civilization – so what does it matter that they differ on some niggling details, for example about women? For more on this alliance and its implications, a key topic, see my "The Left ♥ CAIR, MPAC, et al." and watch for David Horowitz' forthcoming Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, published by Regnery. (June 17, 2004)

Quote:

http://www.blogger.com/r?http%3A%2F%...s%2F000793.php
August 31, 2004
Daniel Pipes on Tariq Ramadan: Why French literacy still matters
by Scott Martens

Readers of my <a href="http://fistfulofeuros.net/archives/000782.php">previous comment</a> on Tariq Ramadan will no doubt have come away with the impression that I don’t much like Daniel Pipes. This is not an entirely accurate assessment of my opinon of him. I think Pipes is an unreconstructed bigot and xenophobic fanatic whose academic work fails to meet even the lowest standards of scholarship, whose career has been built on politically driven attacks, and who has set up with his “Campus Watch” as a terrorist front designed to intimidate academics and ensure that there is as little debate, discussion or rational thought on Israel, US foreign policy or Islam as possible. His reseach and scholarship are not intended to better inform action but to support specific agendas, usually revolving around hating some foreign force or people. Instead of fostering debate, his work is intended to intimidate. Pipes advocates religiously targetted surveillance, he supports making federal university funding conditional on ideology, and he has helped to terrorise professors who are named on his website. In short, I think Pipes is swine.

He is a second generation right-wing tool, the son of one of the men most responsible for America’s “Team B”, which grossly overblew the Soviet menace in the 70s and 80s - causing massive US defense spending and resulting deficits - and complained that anyone with a better sense of reality was soft on communism. Normally, Pipes’ parentage would constitute poor grounds for condeming him as having a pathological relationship to facts. But keep this in mind, since it constitutes one of his arguments against Ramadan.

All you need is Google to find out why I think these things about Daniel Pipes. It’s not a lot of work. His <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/">own website</a> provides ample examples.

But, today, I will be targeting something a little more specific. Pipes has <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/article/2043">put up on his website</a> his comment on Tariq Ramadan’s visa denial, originally published in the New York Post on Friday. In it, he makes specific points against Tariq Ramadan, linking, in some cases, to articles on the web in support. These articles are primarily in French. As a service to our non-francophone readers, we will be translating the relevant sections, since they lead one to the conclusion that Pipes assumes his readers will just take his word on their contents.

We report, you decide.

First, Pipes’ claims:......

Quote:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles...le.asp?ID=9048
Dr. Daniel Pipes and CAIR's Lynch Mob
By Robert Spencer
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 23, 2003

As a Senate committee prepares to meet today to discuss the nomination of Dr. Pipes to the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and its allies are working to turn the hearings into a lynching party of Borkian proportions.....

Quote:

http://baltimorechronicle.com/jul03_pipes-stalled.shtml
SENATORS GET IT RIGHT!
Daniel Pipes nomination stalled in committee
Special to the Chronicle

(WASHINGTON D.C., July 23, 2003) -- Members of the Senate committee charged with recommending Daniel Pipes to serve on the board of the US Institute for Peace (USIP) asked Chairman Judd Gregg (R-NH) for more time to gather more information on the "controversial nominee."

Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA), in calling for more time, cited one of Pipes' statements--"Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene...All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most." (National Review, 11/19/90), Senator Kennedy ended by urging his colleagues to oppose Pipes' nomination.....

.....Senator John Ensign (R-NV) appeared to support Pipes' positions on American Muslims, citing Ronald Reagan's saying "peace through strength."

Following the hearing, Arab, Muslim and Interfaith Groups convened a press conference in the hallway. The moderator, Sarah Eltantawi, Communications Director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, said "The American Muslim and Arab communities will remember who voted which way on Pipes for a long time to come. We are very pleased with the outcome of today's hearing, but the fight is not over."

Quote:

http://www.muslimsforbush.com/mission/mission10.html
DANIEL PIPES

UPDATE:

We here at Muslims For Bush would like to report that Daniel Pipes, himself, has gotten in touch with us, regarding the point we had originally written about below. In his email to us, which was very polite, Daniel Pipes did write that he had, in fact, been saying that "militant Islam is the problem, moderate Islam is the solution" well before his appointment to the United Sates Institute for Peace (USIP). We are very happy that Daniel Pipes has taken the time out to write to us and we feel that it is a very good demonstration of his efforts to build bridges of unity with Muslims in America and around the world. Daniel Pipes also left us with this link, showing his earlier statements - http://www.danielpipes.org/article/421 ...

.....While we strongly oppose the appointment of Daniel Pipes to the United States Institute for Peace (USIP), it should be noted that the behavior of Pipes changed drastically, shortly after being placed upon the board. Almost overnight, Daniel Pipes went from someone who highly alienated many Muslims with his strong criticisms, to a man whom self coined his signature phrase as, “militant Islam is the problem, moderate Islam is the solution.”xxv Despite our opposition to Pipes’ nomination, we are happy to see that President Bush has prevailed upon Pipes, regarding the importance of becoming tolerant and inclusive of all religious faiths, within our great country and around the world!

It should also be noted that, despite being close friends with Senator Kennedy, Senator Kerry did not join Kennedy in publicly condemning the nomination of Daniel Pipes, despite Kennedy’s calls for condemnation against Pipes.xxv